Rock Bottom or Immortality: On Destruction, Rebirth, and the Lovers’ Shadow
There is a kind of destruction that doesn't kill you. It just makes you unrecognisable to yourself and somehow, that is the beginning.
As the Year of the Snake came to a close, I found myself thinking about endings. One morning, without warning, I woke up and decided to burn everything I had known to the ground — labels, relationships, my ideas about life, even meaning itself. It was terrifying. And it was right.
This is Ereshkigal's country. The place where everything is stripped at the gate not by force, but by truth. You do not enter the underworld and leave unchanged. You leave lighter, because you leave with less of what was never really yours.
With each passing day, the fear loosened its grip. Things felt lighter. Clearer. More honest. It was as if I was finally waking up to myself after years of sleepwalking. A brand-new chance to rediscover Lisa but with different eyes.
I damned the consequences. My life felt like it depended on this change. Everything I had been clinging to wasn't working anymore, and staying the same felt like a betrayal of myself, of the inner child who had been quietly begging for newness.
At first, my nervous system panicked. It always does when you step outside the familiar. But then something shifted a release, a softening and suddenly I couldn't understand how I had ever lived any other way. The change felt visceral, ancient, like I had lived here before but forgotten. Everything old melted into oblivion.
That's what destruction does. It doesn't erase you. It clears the old so the new can breathe.
There was a moment a birthday, a threshold when everything felt easier. Exciting. Electric. I stepped into the Fool archetype open-hearted, wide-eyed, ready to leap into the unknown with rose-tinted delusion and a whole new lease on life. Same woman. New world.
But before the leap, there is always the fall.
Before the Fool, there is always the Lovers.
Before rebirth, there is always the descent.
And for me, the descent began with love.
